The first critical bed shortage of the season spurred the major acute trust to declare an internal incident. It cancelled all surgeries except cancer operations and had consultants double checking every patient, ensuring everyone in a bed needed to be there as the focus was “on discharging patients safely to free up capacity”.

Some HSJ readers have questioned the newsworthiness of this episode, pointing out that such incidents are common in today’s NHS. Yet this is the first high profile one to come to light this year, and comes at the sometimes-fêted Royal Free, with one of the busiest emergency departments in England and one of the highest turnovers too.

Whether this results in a big splurge of outsourcing remains to be seen, though. Sending 200,000 extra cases to private hospitals could cost around £400m to £600m, which would threaten to tip NHS expenditure well over the permitted edge in 2018-19.